


Quicksilver in my Blood, Mirrors in my Bones

by Curlscat



Category: The Sisters Grimm - Michael Buckley
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, because in this house we do not respect mb, let me have my cool magic child ok
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 07:20:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26848081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Curlscat/pseuds/Curlscat
Summary: Sabrina didn't manage to use up all the mirror magic at the end of the Council of Mirrors. This was supposed to kill her. It did something else instead.//Maybe she is dead and in her place is a girl made of silvered glass, only reflecting the person she’s replaced.  Maybe Sabrina Grimm died at the tender age of twelve and a half, trying to protect her sister. Maybe she’s a monster. Maybe she’s the thing that scares her most.
Relationships: Minor or Background Relationship(s), Puck Goodfellow/Sabrina Grimm
Comments: 25
Kudos: 45





	Quicksilver in my Blood, Mirrors in my Bones

In the beginning, Sabrina was a twelve-year-old girl who, like many twelve-year-olds, lived with her grandmother. Unlike most twelve-year-olds who live with their grandmothers, she did so because her parents had been kidnapped. It started with that, sort of.

How it really started, though, was this: Sabrina’s best friend tried to kill her. He almost did it. In a room full of mirrors made of pure power, a room of portals and folds in the fabric of space and time, Sabrina was stabbed with shards of glass and mercury and a shattered spell.

If you asked her about it, she’d tell you about a time another child got a shard of a magic mirror in his eye, a second shard in his heart, about how that mirror froze his heart and twisted everything he saw. She wouldn’t tell you how she knew. She might tell you that they told her it would kill her unless she got it all out of her system.

So Sabrina Grimm was covered in mirror-cuts, and there was not enough glass on the ground to rebuild just one of the mirrors, even if you’d wanted to.

She saved the world, her best friend (the one who tried to kill her) died, and she didn’t. And Sabrina Grimm spent the next three years trying to believe that she was human.

The first time she cut herself, after it was all supposed to be over, she was making a sandwich, and she remembers clearly that she needed a knife because the sandwich was going to be made of leftover chicken breast. If you asked (but you wouldn’t ask, because then you’d have to know, and she’s very good at keeping secrets), she might tell you that, might even tell you that she remembers the sandwich because her blood wasn’t red. It was silver, and that was how Sabrina knew that it wasn’t over, that what she thought was the end was really only the start of something else.

* * *

For the most part, these days, Sabrina has adjusted. She is very good about not getting cut in front of other people, and she has learned to mask the way her vision whites out every time someone asks her a question. She is not human anymore, but then again, none of her family is quite human these days.

This was meant to kill her, she knows. It was meant to run like poison through her veins and end with a girl who could never be a witch dead in her best friend’s prison, but instead it’s turned her into… something.

Something new.

Maybe she is dead. Maybe Sabrina Grimm died at the tender age of twelve and a half, trying to protect her sister. All the worst things in Sabrina’s life happened because she was trying to protect her sister, it sometimes feels, but it has never occurred to her to stop.

Anyway, maybe she is dead and in her place is a girl made of silvered glass, only reflecting the person she’s replaced. Maybe she’s a monster. Maybe she’s the thing that scares her most.

She tries not to think about it much.

Sabrina has gotten very good about Not Thinking About Things over the course of her short life. 

She doesn’t think about the adults who were supposed to take care of her and failed, either on accident or horribly, maliciously on purpose. She doesn’t think about her mother deciding to lie to her father and the way it destroyed Sabrina. She doesn’t think about how she has never been good enough for anybody.

So she goes about her days, and she tries not to bleed, and she goes to bed early. If she gets up still tired, she remembers her dreams, and they’re always full of things she Should Not Know.

(They are full, too, of voices. Of the ghosts of the—people? No, not exactly—beings whose power poured into her when they were destroyed. She is full of ghosts, is Sabrina.)

Sometimes, still, when people ask her questions, or even ask questions around her, her vision whites out and swirls back to someplace else, an answer that it takes all her strength not to blurt out aloud. It isn’t always, but it’s often enough that she’s afraid to learn to drive, or even ride her bike with other people nearby.

If she tells anyone, they’ll worry. Or worse, they’ll scold her, and this will become another thing she did wrong, another thing she couldn’t fix. So she doesn’t tell them, even though she wishes, sometimes, that someone would find her out.

Well, all right, she doesn’t wish it  _ sometimes _ . She wishes it nearly always.

Because Sabrina has always been alone, even when there are other people around. She has always been separate. Other. Even before all of this, she was the child among adults, or the bad one among saints, or the protector. The protector is always with the one they’re protecting, but they’re never on a level with them. They’re always standing a ways apart, so they can see approaching threats.

Things might have stayed this way forever, Sabrina alone and afraid and inhuman. And then the love of her life (the bane of her existence. Both at once.) disappeared.

* * *

When she tells the story, later she glosses over the important parts. She talks about the length of the trip to find Puck, about worrying about Daphne next to her. She doesn’t talk about the  _ knowing _ . Doesn’t talk about the way she doubled over in class in pain worse than she’d felt since she was first full of the same power that had warped her own foil, her own lonely possible almost-future. Doesn’t ever talk about what she saw in that first vision in years she hadn’t been able to hide.

Doesn’t want to  _ think _ about what she saw in that vision.

Can’t forget it. Dreams about it.

Puck will always have the scars, but he’s alive to preen over them, call them battle wounds, make up lies about how brave he was when he got them (he was brave, but not in the kind of way he can be proud of). Some nights, when they’re both feeling safe enough to let down their guards, Sabrina will run her fingers over the white crevices of Puck’s skin, and they will both know how he came by them. Sabrina will try not to blame herself for not getting there fast enough to prevent them, and Puck will try not to blame himself for needing help to heal.

They are both trying to be better than their worst selves. Both trying to unlearn hating yourself as protection. It’s slow going. By the time Sabrina passes her first century, maybe the’ll have mastered it.

When it happens, Sabrina is in science class. Nothing this important, this earth-shattering, should ever happen during Environmental Science. The universe should not bend itself into knots to show you parts you don’t understand in this, the science class people take when they’re too lazy (busy. Scared. Frustrated. Tired of lying.) for Physics.

She has just stood up to walk to the front of the class to give a presentation on wind turbines when the world shutters in around her, squeezing down and opening back up somewhere else, somewhere that a boy with blonde curls and green eyes and dirt caked so deep into the knees of his jeans that it won’t come out in the wash is bleeding.

And bleeding.

And bleeding.

When she comes back to herself, she’s doubled over, hands pressed to her head. She’s not sure, but she thinks she’s been screaming. The room is quiet with it, reverberating with the lack of space where a scream was.

Someone asks her name. She’s not sure who (would normally know, doesn’t have space in her head for that knowledge right now, doesn’t have space for anything but  _ blood _ and  _ urgency _ ).

“Do you want to go to the nurse?”

Sabrina says something. It might be yes. Whatever it is, it’s enough that the teacher lets her walk out of the classroom.

She doesn’t go to the nurse, of course. She goes, instead, to the school across the street, where her younger sister is currently learning to speak French.

It won’t occur to her for several hours that telling her sister might be a mistake. She won’t remember that she had good reasons for keeping this a secret. At the moment, her head is only full of the need to  _ move _ , to  _ do _ . To take the next step. After that step, she can concentrate on the one after it.

She bypasses the front office of her sister’s school, allows herself to  _ know _ where her sister is, and walks to that classroom. Knocks on the door. Tells the teacher there’s been a family emergency and Daphne needs to come with her. Doesn’t wait for an answer. Barely waits for her sister to stand before she’s heading back out to the street.

“What’s up?” Daphne asks. She has to jog to keep up with Sabrina, which isn’t usual. She’s grown in the past few years, nearly overtaking her sister, who has yet to recover from two years of near starvation.

“Puck’s in danger,” Sabrina says, and she lets her tone tell her sister all the details without having to say that everything was red and wet and torn open.

They leave the school, and Sabrina has to move to the next step, now. She has her sister. Daphne has magic (Daphne always has magic, the same way Sabrina always has weapons, tucked away under long sleeves or in the torn lining of a bag. They’ve found their own ways to feel safe). Now they need to get to Puck. Which means they need to get to Ferryport Landing. Which means they need to get to the train. Which means they need to take the subway to Penn Station.

One step at a time, she reminds herself. There’s a subway stop at the end of this block.

The steps she takes to get there are very fast ones.

* * *

They rescue Puck. It isn’t that simple, isn’t three words and finished. It’s messy and Sabrina’s blood mixes in with Puck’s, silver and red mixing together like the marbling of an old book’s endpapers. Daphne doesn’t bleed, because Sabrina makes sure of that. She sees Sabrina bleed, though, and she sees her older sister’s eyes flash silver as she fights. 

Because this is something Sabrina can do, now. She can look at someone who’s attacking her and  _ understand _ them,  _ know _ them in a way that’s complete and allows her to predict how they’ll move. Not because she can see the future, but because she can see the way their muscles want to move, how they know to fight. And it means she can fight back better.

She still almost died, of course. Because she is small and young and afraid, always so, so afraid. Afraid for Puck, today. Afraid for Daphne. Afraid for herself.  _ Of _ herself.

Sabrina is hoping that Puck is too out of it to have noticed that she’s bleeding the wrong color, that her toes crunched like glass instead of bone underneath her opponent’s boots. She has no such hope for Daphne. Daphne, who is looking at Sabrina now the way she does, sometimes. When Sabrina has screwed up again. When Sabrina has failed, again, to reach the perfection Daphne expects of her.

The look is measuring and accusatory at once, and Sabrina always feels exposed and small and filthy under it. She squirms on the magic carpet, not meeting her sister’s eyes. Tries to find something to busy herself with. Rewraps Puck’s bandages.

“This is from the mirrors, isn’t it,” Daphne says. It’s not a question. “Back during the war.”

Sabrina doesn’t answer, which is answer enough on its own.

“How long have you known?” Daphne asks. There’s no question of whether or not Sabrina knew before, whether she was keeping it a secret. Sabrina has always been one for secrets, has always tried to hide the worst of herself from everyone. Especially her sister.

“A while,” is all Sabrina says. “I didn’t think it was worth mentioning.”

“You didn’t think it was—” Daphne stares at her sister, stops, takes a deep breath, and then, louder: “Baba Yaga said if you didn’t get it all out, you’d  _ die _ !”

“I’m not dead, though,” Sabrina says. “I didn’t want you to worry.”

Daphne glares at Sabrina, then yanks on the carpet. It changes direction. Wordless, Sabrina notices. She wonders if that’s a witch thing that Daphne’s doing, or if she’s just very good with the carpet.

“Puck needs help,” Sabrina says. She doesn’t ask where they’re going. Doesn’t try to argue Daphne out of this new destination. Just reminds her sister that this can wait. It’s waited three years already, after all.

“He can get it where we’re going,” Daphne says.

* * *

They arrive at Bunny Lancaster’s house, which is confusing, because Bunny is no longer a witch. Her magic and her eyes are several miles away, in a house with chicken legs, filthy with both dirt and reprehensible actions. Daphne leaps off the carpet before it lands, bursting through the front door, already calling for Bunny.

Sabrina limps after, guiding the carpet through the door with Puck still resting atop it. If Bunny can’t help him, she will not wait for her sister to get answers before she takes him to get help. He lost too much blood to wait for Daphne to get over her fit of pique at Sabrina.

She hasn’t looked inside her shoe, but her foot is definitely in need of some immediate medical attention, too.

Daphne, when Sabrina finds her again, is in the middle of explaining things to Bunny. The woman, no longer annoyed at having a preteen girl barge into her house, is listening. Most of what she does these days is listen. Sometimes she talks. But mostly, she listens. She is beginning to hear, too.

“Hi,” Sabrina says, interrupting her sister with less guilt than she’d normally feel. “Puck is dying. Do you have any kind of magical blood transfusion or something?”

“I think I do,” Bunny says. “Now, where did I—”

But, of course, Sabrina already knows the answer. Because Bunny asked. And because the things that have funneled themselves into Sabrina, they were made, first and foremost, to answer questions. And now that one has been asked, Sabrina can answer it, can see,  _ feel _ the bottle in the third shelf on the closet under the stairs, knows that she only has to get Puck to drink it.

The mirrors needed the questions to be asked in rhyme. Sabrina knows, though, (has heard it in her dreams) that this is only because Bunny put stopgaps on their power. Bunny curtailed them so that they would not get overwhelmed. Bunny made sure they would be able to function. Tried to make sure they would not be able to do what the first one tried to do. Sabrina has none of this. She is all the power with none of the safeguards. She could take over the world, if she wanted. She does not want to.

(She could also get overwhelmed, stop functioning, get lost in the constant barrage of  _ too much _ . She does not want to do this, either.)

Sabrina rides the carpet to the cabinet, smacks Puck in the face until he’s awake enough to swallow down the noxious tincture she finds there. He stops looking quite so pale. Sabrina allows herself to relax a very small amount.

She rummages in the shelves for a little while longer, mostly for an excuse to keep from going back and listening to them discuss the problem of Sabrina. She has had more than enough of listening to the problem of Sabrina. She finds some of the noxious salve that her uncle once used to heal her broken arm, and something else that promises, in her own uncle’s spiking handwriting, to seal gashes twice as well as stitches. She takes both, uses them.

One by one, she peels away Puck’s bandages, some scabbed over, some still seeping blood, and rubs the salve over them. They close up underneath her fingers, though sometimes she isn’t neat enough, and they leave little crooked pockmarks of skin.

He is awake enough to watch her do this, though not awake enough to comment, until she pulls off her shoe to reveal the ruin of her left foot. He hisses at the sight of it. Sabrina only refrains from doing so herself because she has been concentrating so hard on not wincing at every bit of pressure against her toes.

She is bleeding from several little cuts, out of which stick what looks like broken glass. Her foot is… not foot shaped. It is as if a window (a mirror) broke inside her toes. As if what is in there is not bones, not exactly.

She does not hold out much hope that the bone repair cream will work. She is still disappointed when it doesn’t.

Sabrina thought she’d gotten used to the idea that she’s not human anymore, not exactly. She still wants to cry at this, another reminder. Or perhaps at the idea that she will never walk right again. Never wear sandals. Never run. Never sneak. Never wield a sword. No doctor can set a glass bone.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Puck asks.

Sabrina shakes her head, Does Not Cry. 

Puck puts a clumsy hand on her knee anyway, tells her “It’s not so bad, not being human.”

Sabrina considers telling him that she wasn’t human anyway, that Mr. Canis made sure of that. But he’s trying to be kind, and she knows that’s not what he meant. Her family is still mostly human, the rest of them. They don’t have wings. Their eyes don’t flash silver. All they have is a longer lifespan. She has been made powerful, but brittle.

She puts her hand over his, and they stay there until Sabrina is ready to face her sister.

* * *

Bunny isn’t able to fix Sabrina, because she is about as magical as your average Wal-Mart these days. She is, however, to start explaining the basics of magic mirror upkeep to Daphne. She promises to teach her more.

Sabrina, it seems, needs maintenance these days. Like a car. (She knows that’s not what it is. That it’s no different than going to the dentist every six months. It doesn’t stop her feeling distinctly uncomfortable while Bunny and Daphne talk about her as if she’s not in the room, discussing “troubleshooting” and “preventative steps.”)

She is also not slowly dying. She had sort of assumed this on her own, but it is nice to know for certain. Bunny guides Daphne through a diagnostic spell to ascertain this, and Sabrina is most certainly no longer a human girl, but she is also not being eaten alive by more magic than her system can handle. 

“Don’t tell Mom and Dad,” Sabrina requests.

Puck gives her a look that suggests what he thinks of that idea, but he doesn’t protest. Daphne is vocal, but Sabrina mostly tunes her out.

“I’m not going to keep it a secret forever,” she says. “I just wanna tell them on my own terms.”

“I’ll give you a month,” Daphne says.

It’s better than Sabrina was expecting. She’ll take it.

* * *

When Sabrina tells her parents, it is nearly the end of her sister’s allotted grace period. She sits them down at the table, tells them she needs to talk to them. Asks if they remember back during the war, how she got really sick for a little bit. How she got full of mirror-magic. How they thought it was all gone.

(She considered, briefly, cutting herself open to show them just how different she is inside, but decided it wasn’t necessary. Too gruesome. Too liable to make Henry go overprotective before she even showed them her blood.)

They take it better than she’d expected. Henry frets and demands to know why he wasn’t told sooner. Veronica asks brokenly how long Sabrina’s been carrying this by herself. It’s painful, and Sabrina would like to not be here. But neither of them demand that she carry herself right off to someone who can tell her how to get her back to normal (Daphne asked her, a few weeks ago, if there was a cure, and Sabrina’s eyes had flashed silver when she told her younger sister that it was too late, that to take this out of her now would kill her as bad as it almost did going in). Neither blame her, or magic, or her grandmother for it. Neither expect her to bury it.

Instead, once they’ve done the required parental worrying, they being talking about how to make sure life is easier for her. They ask her what they need to do to make life easier. They listen when she tells them about the way questions drag her out of herself and into their answers. When she mentions the voices in her dreams, they suggest she talk with Scrooge, learn how to manage living with ghosts. When they learn about how brittle her bones are (Henry suggests she stop her fencing lessons with Charming, but when she says no, he accepts), they discuss reinforced shoes, getting her uncle to put a charm on her clothes.

(Sabrina thinks, that if she’d had parents like this before the whole mess, if her parents learned to listen and to compromise a few years ago, a decade ago, back when they first met, perhaps she’d have grown up safe and happy.

Then again, perhaps not. She could know, if she wanted to. But she’s not sure she does.)

They are listening now. It will be enough. It has to be. Enough that only she will be the fractured child, that her sister and brother will grow up with parents who try to understand and to help and don’t make ultimatums or go behind each other’s backs. And she? She who is too grown up already to bounce back from all the cracks they’ve left on her surface? She who is warped and scarred and not even human anymore?

She doesn’t know.

But she will keep looking until she finds the answer. And that, in itself, is its own sort of answer.


End file.
